It's frustrating to have an offer that you know is amazing and that gets amazing results for the people who buy it, but that you're struggling to grow the way you'd like to.
That's what today's guest, Heather Levin, was experiencing prior to hosting her first summit. She had a great membership in an amazing and unique niche, but nothing she was doing was creating the results she wanted and making it take off the way she knew it could.
The good news is that her first summit completely changed that.
Read on to hear what made Heather decide to go for it with her first summit, what the experience was like, and how it completely transformed her business.
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Episode at a glance:
[1:23] Heather got her start in online business with a business called The Greenest Acre, which was all about homesteading. But it wasn't long before she realized that she wanted to focus on a more specific niche within homesteading, which is where her current business and membership, Chicken Health Academy, came to be.
Homesteading is such a broad audience, but I started to realize that I really loved writing about chickens. Every time it came time for me to talk about chickens or write about chickens, I just got really excited. And even though I had no proof it was going to work, niching down to just chickens just felt right.
[4:16] Before hosting her summit, Heather was selling her Chicken Health Academy Program as a course with a one-time fee rather than a membership, but it just wasn't taking off. She was getting to a point where she either had to figure out how to make her business work or start taking on freelance writing clients again. But after participating in Shelby Devore's Garden. Farm. Thrive summit, she was so excited to try it for herself.
I didn't even know summits were a thing until I took part in Shelby summit, but it was such a great experience that It got me thinking about hosting one for myself. So then, when I heard about Summit in a Box a few months later I decided to just try it. And truly, this was like the last roll of the dice for us, because we were in a place where I needed to make this business work, or take a completely different avenue and go back to freelancing. It was nerve racking but I'm so glad I did it.
[7:59] Heather breaks down her biggest fears and doubts about hosting her first summit like being afraid it wasn't going to work or making their money back on the Launch with a Summit Accelerator program. She was also worried about the time investment because she homeschools her kids, and only gets about 2.5 days of work per week.
I wanted to make my investment back, but beyond that I really just wanted leads. Of course I set revenue and membership goals, and I had very ambitious goals, but there was a part of me that really didn't think it was going to be as successful as it was. Because for the past two years I had tried so many different things that didn't didn't work, and so when this did it blew my mind. It completely blew my mind.
[11:11] Now let's get into all the details about Heather's summit! She hosted the Backyard Chicken Summit, and while there are other poultry summits for commercial poultry growers this was the first summit for people raising chickens in their backyards. She wanted to create an event that would help her audience in all aspects of chicken keeping.
I think one of the things that was most impactful about this summit was that it really made me understand how people were craving a sense of community. There are all these different chicken groups online, but when people came together for this summit, the energy was just really incredible, and it made me understand that a sense of community was lacking in Chicken Health Academy. After the first summit I made made a lot of effort to create community in my own membership, and I think that's made a huge difference in my retention and success of the membership, because I didn't really understand until the first summit how much people were craving that sense of friendship and community in this niche.
[13:06] We also get into Heather's breakdown of the details of her summit numbers, including how much she made in her first and second summits.
For the first summit we had just over $30,000 in total sales, $23,000 after affiliate commissions, and 5500 attendees. And then for the second we had $47,000 in total sales, $43,000 after affiliate commissions, and about 6500 attendees. But the amount of people that I got into my membership through these two summits has completely transformed not just the membership itself, but also the income that we're getting from those regular members.
[15:57 She rounds out this episode by sharing how her summit was completely life-changing for her and her family. She learned that her community is what people wanted and what keeps them coming back for more.
Don't give up. You don't know what's right around the corner. Find a way through it. Our life now looks completely different than just it did a year ago, because it hasn't even been a year since my first summit, and it's amazing how much has changed in just a year because of it.
About Heather
Heather Levin is an educator, herbalist, and chicken wrangler of 30+ chickens. She's also the founder of The Backyard Chickens Summit and Chicken Health Academy, a pioneering online membership that teaches natural and emergency chicken care strategies.
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